Dear Friends,
Greetings from scorching Indianapolis, Indiana! The sweet corn is in season and the temperatures are sky-high. It's a great time to be inside, practicing. 🥵 🎹
Last weekend I launched Piano Lit, a self-paced mini-course designed to guide you through six weeks of intentional listening. I was amazed at the response! It’s clear that many of us want to spend more time with music, but don’t always know where to start. Thank you to everybody who has purchased the course. If you're curious, you can take a look here.
Anyway... these days I’m thinking a lot about Fanny Mendelssohn. She was a precocious young pianist and composer, seemingly equally talented as her younger brother, Felix. At age 13, Fanny performed 24 preludes from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier for her father, from memory! 🤯 Everyone was very impressed, but her aunt was also a bit nervous that it might damage her to do something that required so much exertion, given that she was a girl and all.
On her 23rd birthday, when Fanny was engaged to be married, Mendelssohn’s father wrote her a letter to tell her it was time to prepare for her true calling, as a housewife. Women had to take on a difficult task, he wrote: "the constant occupation with apparent trifles, the interception of each drop of rain, that it may not evaporate but be conducted into the right channel, and spread wealth and blessing.”
This letter, and the message that Fanny received throughout her young life that a woman’s energy should be quietly redirected into domestic virtue, is something I have been thinking about while practicing Fanny’s piano masterpiece Das Jahr. Confronted with this amazing composition, it’s hard to imagine someone with her musical gifts being asked to set them aside in favor of managing household details. And yet that was the prevailing expectation, even from her own family.
But Fanny kept going. Despite the cultural norms that discouraged women from having artistic ambitions (especially women of her social class!), she continued to identify as a musician, and built the most vibrant creative life she could within the strictures imposed upon her.
Fortunately, she married Wilhelm Hensel, a painter who supported her musical ambitions. Her regular garden salons became a vital part of Berlin’s cultural life (and a workaround for the prohibition on Fanny performing in public, because these concerts were technically private), and her compositions show a creative, unique musical voice.
What Fanny experienced is what many of us would now call a calling. Music wasn’t a hobby for her; it was her identity. And although she had plenty of reasons to simply stop and turn over a new page in her life when she got married, she never did. In fact, she played music until the day she died, when she had a stroke during a rehearsal for one of her Sunday salons.
Her story is a reminder of the importance of listening to that inner voice: the one that draws us toward our own calling.
It’s easy to hesitate, or wait for somebody to give us permission. We delay our dreams, waiting for the “right time” or telling ourselves that it’s not practical. We major in business instead of music because it’s more “sensible,” or we don’t pick up those piano lessons because we “won’t be any good anyway.”
Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel continued her rich musical life even without “permission” - she composed, performed, and organized her life around music because she knew she had no choice otherwise.
So my question for you this week is: What might you decide to do even if nobody gives you permission?
Happy practicing!
-Kate
PS I read these stories about Fanny Hensel in R. Larry Todd's compelling biography of Fanny Mendelssohn, called Fanny Hensel: The Other Mendelssohn. It's worth checking out if you're interested in learning more about her.